Darpa Taking Fire for Its Cyberwar Range

Two years ago, the White House and the Pentagon launched a massive, secretive $17 billion effort to shore up the nation’s defenses, and assigned Darpa a crucial role: build a replica Internet — a “National Cyber Range” — that could not only be used to test out information attacks, but could “emulate human behavior on all nodes,” as well.

“The services didn’t want to wait around for Darpa,” a senior official tells the magazine. “Everybody wanted a range, but Darpa’s program was a 6-to-7-year effort to put a national cyber range in place. That’s why support eroded. Everybody wanted it quicker.” The Navy, the National Security Agency, and the Air Force are all pursuing ersatz Internet programs, according to AvWeek.

I’ve pinged Darpa for a response. But I’m guessing that program manager Michael Van Putte would argue that his program is a lot more far-reaching than giving government hackers a new network playground. Today’s ranges take months to set up a single test, with each machine manually configured. Van Putte wants to conduct multiple tests at once, and then rejigger the network topology with a few mouse clicks. Plus, he wants all those emulated people running around on the network. “You will have automated ‘bots’ that are trying to get work done while you’re trying to test the security. So you’ll be able to quantitatively measure their effectiveness at work and at the same time, your effectiveness at keeping the bad guys out of your network,” VanPutte tells Signal magazine.

“Over the ages, scientific progress has been held back by the ability to make measurements at the level of the environment for which the scientific research was being done: Telescopes, microscopes, particle accelerators, etc.,” he noted in a recent presentation. “The National Cyber Range is the measurement capability for cyber research in both classified and unclassified environments. Without it, research will be done in darkness and only stumble accidentally into the light.”